Thursday, February 22, 2007

Contact David Prather, Camp Manager at dwprather68ATyahoo.com or 530-748-7275 for more information or to register.

This 6-day camp (Sunday afternoon through Friday) offers a safe and comfortable introduction to cross-country soaring suitable for beginning and intermediate cross-country pilots. Days begin with enjoyable and informative classroom sessions in the morning, continue with lead & follow flights in the afternoons, and frequently conclude with an optional evening activity. You'll learn from experienced lead (or mentor) pilots who regularly make recreational cross country flights from Air Sailing, Truckee and Minden, many whom are active and former NCSA members. The facilities at Air Sailing are fantastic, so come join us for some great flying, a wealth of practical cross-country knowledge and an opportunity to hang around glider people for an entire week.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

This week's episode of PBS's perennial Nature wasabout birds of prey. The episode included an extended treatment ofvarious type of flying, including soaring flight. The material ondynamic soaring was particularly interesting and included footage of both radio-controlled and full-size gliders.

PBS has a site devoted to the episode, and the KQED website shows several repeat broadcasts later this week.

Sunday, February 18, 2007

I hope you will find the Seminar an interesting day. It should generategood questions and interesting answers.

Dan Gudgel and I are looking forward to your attendance.

You can register at the door for $60.00, non soaring guests will cost $30.00.Attendees don't have to be PASCO members. Full registration fee attendeeswill also receive a CD documenting the Power Point presentations.

Friday, February 16, 2007

This five-day camp is for beginner and intermediate-level glider pilots who want to develop efficient thermal soaring skills for longer local flights and for safe cross-country flights.

The objective of the Thermaling Camp is to develop and sharpen thermaling and soaring abilities through comprehensive lectures, practical demonstrations, and daily practice of the basic concepts and skills of recreational thermal soaring.

Thermaling Camp is five days of soaring talk and practice. Daily lectures, demonstrations, and flights start at 8:30 AM and continue through at least 5 PM. The week is topped off with a banquet and celebration of accomplishments on Friday evening.

Participants must have a Private Pilot Glider certificate or a Student Pilot certificate with 5 hours solo experience.

This five-day camp is for beginning and intermediate-level glider pilots who desire improved and more efficient soaring skills for longer local flights and for safer cross-country flights. For those more experienced pilots, an official observer will be available for badge flights.

The SSA ABC & Bronze Badge Training Program provides a basic approach to flying thereby developing skills and experience necessary for future flights and FAI Badge attempts. The objective of this Camp is to develop and sharpen your soaring abilities through lectures, practical demonstrations and daily practice of the basic concepts and skills of recreational soaring.

Camp is five days of soaring talk and practice. Daily safety orientations, lectures, Schedule demonstrations and flights start at 8:30 AM and continue through at least 5 PM. The week is topped off with a banquet and celebration of accomplishments on Friday evening.

Participants must have a Private Pilot Glider certificate or a Student Pilot certificate with 5 hours solo experience.

My work background hasbeen in Aviation Maintenance for the past 22 years. I've enjoyed manyaspects of the job from working on Ag Helicopters to restoring P-51Mustang wings that went on to race around the pylons of Reno. Thismonth marks my 18th year at United Airlines, helping maintain their fleet of passenger aircraft.

Finishingup my power rating in '87 I'd always felt that there was somethingmissing in my flying. Pulling the rope release on that ASK-21 in '94, Ihad no idea I'd just changed my life forever. The freedom of soaringcaptured my heart and soul, filling the void that was missing in mypower flying. Receiving my commercial glider rating allowed me to sharethe sport of soaring with a variety of interesting people over the pastdecade.

I look forward to flying my own ship and working with the members here at the NCSA.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Bill Gage - joined on Feb 11. Have been contemplating learning soaring for some time. First logged flight was 25 years ago. Next flight was 4 years ago. Now I have had 3 more. Progress!

I am a power pilot. Learned in college through ROTC, then went on to fly helicopters in the Army. Have also done a fair amount of fixed wing flying. Had half a Citabria for a few years. More recently was in a flying club, where we had a C-172, C-182, a Bonanza and a Citabria. (Loved the Bonanza) But the club imploded after an accident. I am excited to be flying again and developing a new skill.

I am married to Jackie - we live in Point Richmond. We are pretty active in sailing; we have a boat and I have been quite active in running sailboat races on the Bay. I am now the regional race officer for US Sailing, the national organization.

We have two kids. Colin recently graduated as an electrical engineer from UC San Diego. Michele is a junior at Columbia in New York, where she is also on the basketball team.

Then, read and work through ASA's Private Pilot Test Prep. This book is updated every year, and contains every question in the FAA's text bank, with answers and explanations. I recommend you work through all the questions relevant to the Glider test; they are marked ALL and GLD.

I was not particularly impressed with the coverage of weather services in the GFH and the Test Prep book. There's a lot of detail to know about how to read the various charts, how to interpret cryptic Telex-format weather reports, and what all the different reports are called. The GFM and Test Prep book really only teach a bare imperfect minimum. To fix this problem, I recommend reading Aviation Weather and Aviation Weather Services, but consider this supplementary.

All four of these titles are available on Amazon as of this writing. You should be able to look them up by name.

If you start from scratch, reading through the GFM and working through the Test Prep book might take you fifteen evenings at a comfortable pace.

Finally, while taking the written test is an important step in getting your license, the Flight Examiner will not rely on it when he administers the Oral. Expect him to ask many of the same questions you have already studied for and answered on the written test. This may be a bit frustrating, particularly if you scored high on the written test.

Sunday, February 11, 2007

One of the last tasks for the Field Manager at the end of each day is making a brief report on the day's flying. Once upon a time, this report went in one place: the FM notebook in the clubhouse. Right now it is also supposed to be echoed to NCSoar. Of course, since the FM can't take the notebook with him, he has to make a private copy somewhere, which is the third time the report gets written down.

I say reporting in triplicate is too much, and we should amend our requirements to avoid it. Let's do away with the notebook, and let the message to NCSoar be the actual FM report. This will do away with the first copy, and also the second, assuming the FM composes the NCSoar report directly.

This new procedure does raise the possibility that the next day's field manager will arrive without having seen the NCSoar report -- for whatever reason -- and will have no simple way of determining whether anything noteworthy took place the day before. To that end I propose that the FM leave a note of any really urgent items on the small whiteboard inside the clubhouse entrance.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Some things can be said succinctly, and others require thousands of words. Both types of articles are welcome in The Buzzard. Here are three suggestions for articles that can be written in three paragraphs or less.

The Web-Pointer

A decent web-pointer article can be written in a paragraph: a URL to the page, and a few sentences on what's there and why it is interesting.

The Book Review

This will require a bit more description than the Web-Pointer, since the reader can't just click over and examine the page himself. There should be a brief summary of what the book has to say, and an evaluation of whether it succeeds in doing so. Still, three paragraphs should be enough for a brief treatment.

The Anecdote

Something happened--probably to you. What happened, and where? What did you do? Did it work, and why? No fuss, no mess; three paragraphs.

[Is it true the editor is a mad fan of the inimitable Michelle Flaherty, and views with particular favor any anecdote that begins with the words "This one time, at..."? -- Yes, indeed it is, and he is quite fond of words like "inimitable", too.]

The Buzzard, our newsletter, was last published in November, 2002. It has now returned in this form, updated for the new millennium. [Did he really write "for the new millennium?" -- Yes, indeed he did.]

The Buzzard is not a replacement for NCSoar, our mailing list. NCSoar will remain as a forum for open discussion. By contrast, what appears in The Buzzard will be a bit more formal, and a bit more polished. Expect to see announcements about events and accomplishments, and carefully written articles about topics relevant to our club.

If you have something to submit to The Buzzard, send it to the editor by email; the email link is in the sidebar, on the right. Straightforward announcements will generally be posted promptly; expect a few rounds of revision for longer articles.

About the Buzzard

The Buzzard is the online journal of the Northern California Soaring Association(NCSA), a soaring club located in the San Francisco Bay area. The club operates generally on weekends, and flies out of Byron Airport.